


Fidelis

by inlovewithnight



Category: Forsyte Saga - John Galsworthy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-22
Updated: 2005-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-18 05:12:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/185400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight





	Fidelis

Leaving Robin Hill was, perhaps, more unsettling than it should have been, given that Irene had left houses behind many times before. She had left happy and unhappy homes in her life, and Robin Hill was neither as happy as her father's house nor as unhappy as the green-doored construction (never home, not in her heart) that she had occupied as a Forsyte bride. She'd never truly seen herself as wife to Jo Forsyte, but a friend and companion here at Robin Hill, where, she supposed, she had been the most _content_ of anywhere she'd lived.

How could she not be, truly-- after all, it had been designed for her.

 _"Every beam and every line,"_ murmured her shadowy companion, visible only to her eyes, audible only to her ears. She had found it difficult to believe, for a time, that _none_ of the sensitive and and broad-minded family who had lived here had ever noticed him. But then she'd realized that of course, it was a matter of his will as much as theirs, and Phil quite simply took no notice of the rest of them whatsoever.

He'd noticed _her_ , certainly; that first afternoon that she had walked up to tea on old Uncle Jolyon's arm, Phil had flung himself upon her with such an utter spiritual shock, it was nearly physical. He had been wild with delight to see her-- it had been so long,so very long, since the day he died, in fact--

He was remarkably untroubled by his state, as she supposed she ought to have expected. Phil's mind had always skittered about too impatiently to be troubled by such things as the lack of corporeality. He'd waited here, bound within the walls where he'd poured out the great effort and passion of his short life ( _"For you, every board and brick for you"_ ), and he'd waited for her to come to him.

It had taken her a very long time, even by a ghost's way of reckoning. She remembered how she'd walked through the house on Uncle Jolyon's arm, or slipped about it when he fell into one of his naps, and Phil at her elbow, ceaselessly whispering. He'd been frantic to show her every room and every corner, just as he'd done when the house was built. They'd stood for years by the time she saw them again, and he murmured in her ear of how his great work, his testimonial edifice to her beauty, had endured.

He'd been brought up short, here and there, by the furnishings and decorations Jo's second family had left ( _"That was not what I intended,"_ he would hiss, wringing spectral hands and rolling his eyes, those strange and terrible eyes of the dead. _"Not at all, not at all."_ ) In the years that she had been mistress of the house, she had made a quiet effort to appease him, doing her best at each redecoration, within the fashions of the new day, to make things as he'd meant them. And when she got it right, he was so pleased-- so pleased--

 _"You have such an eye for beauty,"_ he said now, fluttering anxiously about the room, willfully not noticing the sheets over the furniture, the absence of all the accoutrements of living. _"Of course you have-- you were my muse, my vision of perfect beauty. It flows through you-- perhaps it flows_ from _you? Oh, Irene, my love--"_

He refused to accept that, once again, she was going, and this time forever; he would not even hear it, or perhaps could not. He'd been like this toward the end of that stolen summer of visits to Uncle Jolyon and little Holly, when she'd tried to tell him that she couldn't come any more, that it was simply impossible. An old man alone could be permitted his eccentricity, but Jo and Helene simply could not be expected to entertain such as her. He was June's own _father_...though that particular concern had certainly vanished over time...

Phil had not heard her then, and he would not hear her now, though there seemed to be even an extra edge to his willfulness today. Perhaps the impossible could sense the inevitable.

Another long absence, then, after Uncle Jolyon's summer. Then the handful of visits to Jo during that belated trouble with Soames, and each time the same, Phil's frantic, eager presence nearly bowling her over the moment she stepped through the door. He never changed, not in the slightest-- forever wide-eyed and smooth-faced and young. He never changed the way he looked at her, either, however much she aged.

She supposed she should feel guilt for the doubts of her younger self, though it had certainly not been unreasonable to question the constancy of the lover who had been so inconstant to her young cousin-by-marriage. His devotion to her, it seemed, had been proven truly eternal; or perhaps it was only frozen in the way it had been at the time of his death, fevered and wild, raised to the height of passion and indignation on her behalf against her husband.

It hardly mattered. Here he had remained, first longing for and then alongside her, murmuring always in her ear. And she'd learned the answer to another of her younger self's doubting questions-- if she would not have grown tired of him herself in time, weary of soothing his flares and sulks of temper. Those lingered even beyond death, and had failed to defray her affection. She was quite certain, though it would be unthinkable to remark upon it, that June should not have fared so well with Phillip, had she kept him. The Forsyte in her, the practical bent, would have demanded that she _solve_ that which spun him inot brooding despair, and that was not what he wanted at all, only sympathy until such time as he spun out of it again. The artist in him would have resented June's practicality in time, if not come to despise the good-natured creature who bore it.

No matter now; so very many years no matter. And Phil the same, still the bright-eyed and laughing near-boy she'd loved, and who had loved her. He seemed to still see in her the lithe and golden-haired girl, not the worn and aged mother she'd become.

He could tell that she thought of Jon-- he always could tell, and it stirred him. He eyed her feelings for her son, the only affection in her heart as strong or stronger than what she'd felt for him, with confusion and distaste. Possessive ghost, loving ghost; and beloved, as well. She would miss him terribly when she closed Robin Hill's door forever and drove away. Not long, now, until that time. But she had missed Phil terribly before, and so knew that she could, indeed, endure it.

 _"Irene,"_ he whispered in her ear, pacing frantically around her, seeking to call her attention to him once more. _"Irene."_

"You must move on," she said aloud, watching him from the corner of her eye-- she saw him most clearly that way, and hadn't it ever been so? "I shan't be returning this time; Jon's called me to Canada, and we won't come back. You must go on, Phil."

He quivered, flickering with irritable energy, ceasing in his pacing to look at her. _"I don't want you to go."_

She couldn't help but laugh. "Oh! When has the world ever cared what you or I wanted?"

He watched her, and it suddenly seemed that if she turned her head and looked on him directly, he would stand there solid, flesh and bone.

 _"So you choose him over me?"_ he asked, and she shook her head, eyes still averted so as not to chance the loss of the illusion.

"There's no choice in the matter, Phil."

He stood there, still apparently solid as she herself. Perhaps she had somehow faded into a ghost as well, and that was the cause of the change in her perception. "I am sorry," she whispered. Another apology on the hill of regret that overshadowed her life.

 _"And so it is,"_ he said, in such an odd way that she did turn to see him directly, and her eyes or her heart _had_ deceived her; he was spectral still. _"Would you grant me one thing before you go, my Irene?"_

"If I'm able," she said softly, and he laughed, fluttering in her vision-- she always had been so cautious in her committments, since the disaster of her marriage; Jo had teased her often.

 _"Stand there, in the sunlight?"_ he asked, gesturing at the room's great window. _"I dreamed of that, when I designed this room-- you standing there in the sunlight."_

She smiled, through the tears in those eyes that had cried so often over the years tha tit scarcely troubled them anymore, causing neither redness nor pain. She moved to stand in the square of light, glancing out the window over the broad lawn and then turning to Phil, who hovered there half-present in the shadows of her room, watching her with those ghost's eyes, loving her just as he had for so long.

 _"Forever,"_ he murmured, as if he could read her thoughts. _"Forever, Irene."_ And ever so slowly, he thinned and faded away, gazing at her with wonder until he was gone.

Irene Heron Forsyte Forsyte, never joined to any in spirit but the one to whom she had not been joined in name, remained there by the window for perhaps another quarter of an hour.  



End file.
